On Wed, Oct 17, 2012 at 5:24 PM, Steven D'Aprano <steve+comp.lang.pyt...@pearwood.info> wrote: > In an ideal world, we'd all agree on what counts as acceptable behaviour, > and stick to it, and discuss nothing but Python coding problems. But we > don't live in an idea world, and there are disagreements and people > behaving badly, and arguments about such, and meta-arguments about the > arguments. > > Welcome to humanity.
Every negative is a corrupted version of a positive. Why are there these sorts of arguments? Because people care about the quality of posts. Why have meta-arguments? Because Python programmers have the sorts of brains that are good at (and enjoy) such. > And more importantly, welcome to democracy -- this is not a dictatorship, > there is no Supreme Glorious Leader who decides what is on- and off- > topic, no Thought Police to ban you for straying from the straight and > narrow of what is allowed. And thank goodness for that. I've been on > lists that do have such policies, and they tend to give lousy advice > badly and have a culture of group-think. Correction: Welcome to anarchy. In a democracy, we'd all vote and anyone voted out would be banned. Otherwise, absolutely agree. > Sure, it's frustrating to have to hit delete on a bunch of posts you > don't care about. But that's true regardless of the topic or the list. > Last night I deleted about 300 emails about designing a new asynchronous > library that I had no desire to take part in. Did I post an angry screed > calling it BS? No I did not, because I'm aware that even if I'm not > interested in it, it is a part of Python culture and *somebody* needs to > deal with it. I'm just glad its not me. Heh, I'm skipping all those posts too - but I'm confident Python will be the better for that discussion. I'm on many mailing lists. Some quiet, some noisy, some public, some private (and don't knock the private ones - it's WAY better to use Mailman than huge cc: lists), some courteous, some rude. Not one of them is useless to the world. If you don't like python-list, maybe there's another forum that's more to your liking - Python is big enough to have several. :) ChrisA -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
